Everyone Else has written about this book, so….
1. Reading “Adult Braces” the second time through to fully decide if it’s messy like a tomato that I love, or when one’s whole purse falls out in front of everyone. Still kind of can’t decide, though I wonder if L&A might have gotten similar results from, like, hiring an assistant they pledged that nobody would bone. Since so much of what I’m reading about them and Roya is about coffee, and bill-paying and, well, non-shippy things. Not that I know what triads or throuples really feel like. Obviously.
2. Love is lovely, though, and I wish I had more. How could I begrudge someone for trying to keep their thing together instead of sacrificing for someone else’s version of a principle? Yeah, it would be nice to feel like someone really had it figured out, but does that mean that person has to stick with that version of her life forever because it satisfies us? It’s like a larger version of why I got stuck writing snarky crippled college girls after my actual life felt like something else.
3. As a disabled person with one easy-to-diagnose condition and one tough one, I welcome Lindy West to the neurodivergent family. I also have read that women with ADD tend less toward dramatic, impulsive acts and more toward dreaminess, being forgetful and things like that. So, you might have gotten some bad advice—my hard-to diagnose thing was dyscalculia, which would only have factored in here if I’d fully kicked it Buzzfeed style and written “10 Things I Think About Lindy West’s Latest” and come up with eight. Or twelve. (Yes, that’s why I stopped aping listicles. Besides certain old-hat aspects.) Didn’t get dx till way at the end of college, though I could have written an article called “Why Does Math Class Make Me Want to Die?” way before that. Again, didn’t come up till more high-level math so maybe that was my “too successful” while people were trying to find paper, or pens, or resolve my non-existent “Yes, You Can Be Cute and Still Factor Equations” issues(seriously, boys in my class thought of me as either One of The Guys or, possibly, drooling tapioca into a cup, neither of which was ever altered by classroom performance, despite my showing up as if I were on a game show fighting for a slot in maybe the middle class, or maybe humanity, a great deal of the time. Who wants to be that person’s friend? I compounded my own struggles without realizing it a bunch of the time.)
4. Did people, including Lindy West herself, really set her up as the Queen-Sized leader of the feminists? Gen X usually doesn’t get included in the chat here, but I don’t remember that meeting. (Although maybe there is a feature like that, because editors tend not to respond well to “Leaderless movement from the bottom up,” and just want Faces—with the added bonus of getting to one day debunk what you set up in the first place.) Although, yeah, it would be nice if “happily ever after” were real, but even Jimmy Buffett wrote about “Happily ever after/ every now and then” and maybe that’s what people really get.
5. Nobody really wants to read the book about the couple that never messes up the foreplay and where the husband does EXACTLY 50% around the house, but did this book have to be *this* messy? I’m kind of thinking not. Editing is still a thing that writers can do.
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